Everyone knows that Mark Madden is the worst, but really, it’s fun to get in a reminder every now and then. Also Dejan Kovacevic, formerly of the Trib but now writing independently, has always had a horrible paternalistic attitude about sportswriting. In fact, he was one of the first people I ripped on White Male Sports Journalists for trying to act like he just pulled himself up by his bootstraps to get where he is today, god damn it.
Anyway, apparently Mark Madden ripped a female reporter named Britt McHenry on his show. McHenry traveled to Pittsburgh for ESPN and ended up interviewing Brian Dumoulin and Bryan Rust for Sportscenter. The implication has been that she ended up doing this because she was unable to talk to Sidney Crosby, who was being quarantined after being diagnosed with mumps.
I’ve looked all over ESPN’s website for the Sportscenter clip she apparently did, but no dice.
At any rate, McHenry also apparently took the opportunity on Monday to ask for a one-on-one with Sid. She states that she meant when he was out of quarantine, presumably Wednesday.
Now, ESPN is notorious for their poor hockey coverage. It’s really not outside of the realm of possibility that McHenry, while working her usual beat, was told “hey go to Pittsburgh and talk to Sidney Crosby” by her boss several days before Sid’s mumps diagnosis was announced. You will note that McHenry was with the team on Monday. If she arrives Sunday for her assignment, gets off the plane, and is told “lol Crosby has mumps” what exactly is she supposed to do, turn around and go home? Obviously I’m not claiming to have intimate details of McHenry and her crew’s travel plans or how work is assigned to her–I’m merely suggesting that, in light of a breaking story that affected the team she was meant to be reporting on, McHenry had to change tack with her Monday night story. She also asked for a one-on-one with the team’s signature player. If Sportscenter, a mainstream program not known for its hockey coverage, sends you to Pittsburgh to cover the Penguins, that is honestly just something you should try to do. The team is allowed to say no, after all. But you’d be remiss to not ask. You’re not going to get a scoop from Sidney Crosby or anything. But if you’ve ever worked a hockey beat (and yes! this is something I’ve finally done now!) you should know as a writer that while your quotes aren’t going to be mind-blowing, they add texture to your story and provide insight from the folks who, you know, actually play the damn game.
You see, sports reporting is at its ideal a symbiotic relationship. We generate content about the thing that interests us so that we can communicate about it as a society. Talking to Sidney Crosby, even if he’s just going to say “yeah you know what my face hurts a lot”, is part of that exchange. It’s a fine line to walk. If you’re a good reporter, you take the quick interview you just did, transcribe however many precious seconds of commentary you got, and contextualize it in such a way that you enrich your story. If you’re a bad reporter, well, that’s the same as being a bad member of society. You might instead sensationalize your content in such a way that it becomes decontextualized. Imagine that.
Mark Madden decided to yell on-air about the fact that Britt McHenry requested an interview with Sidney Crosby despite the fact that as of Monday he was in quarantine. This is apparently evidence that McHenry doesn’t know anything about her subject. Are we hearing echoes of a certain something here? (Please see the title of this post.)
There was a Twitter feud of some kind. McHenry’s mentions have been flooded with misogynistic comments, apparently implying that she got to where she is by wearing tight clothing. A lot of related tweets have been deleted, including typical paternalistic bullshit by Kovacevic. McHenry responded:
Timeline apparently hard to understand: Crosby out Mon., team off today, expected back Wed. Asked for an interview once he returned. #facts
— Britt McHenry (@BrittMcHenry) December 16, 2014
Someone who saw Dejan’s tweets before he deleted them attempted to fill me in as to their content:
My source is referring to Dejan’s December 15th column:
(As an aside, could someone tell Dejan that CMS platforms have scalable themes now, i.e. there’s absolutely no reason the desktop version of his site needs to be a single full-page-width column in Times New Roman? jfc)
Anyway, everyone knows from middle school that it’s rude to talk shit about somebody behind their back without naming them, but a lot of folks just never learn. This is a fairly obvious problem. Dejan’s “clever” petulance is par for the course.
Madden’s timeline and the mentions McHenry has received speak for themselves. Let’s pull a few winners.
Madden: if you’ve been threatened at home and are upset about it, you just don’t have thick enough skin. Right, okay. Let’s talk about anyone who has ever been stalked or harassed. Maybe he should also ask Brianna Wu.
Mark Madden wants public figures to testify as character witnesses on his behalf, basically. He’s saying “I do the following good things which apparently excuse me from criticism”? Which is weird, since most of his tweets are about how REAL EQUALITY means that women have to be ready to take all criticism.
Man, who is going to white knight for Mark here? This is sad.
It’s okay you guys Mark doesn’t agree with it or support it!!! But if you don’t want to be abused or harassed, it’s probably your fault.
This is from a person who claims in other tweets that he “doesn’t get chummy” with the teams he covers. But he can feel free to cite them and court public opinion for himself using their name. It’s the shitty Twitter equivalent of writing yourself a glowing recommendation letter on your boss’s letterhead.
And then stapling a manifesto to it, on the same letterhead, about how women ought to behave if they want Mark Madden to respect them:
Mark Madden thinks that it is unprofessional for any female who works in reporting to also model, or to apparently show her body in any way. To bring this back to the ESPN Body Issue–have all reporters sufficiently “unseen” the male athletes portrayed nude in that magazine? Maybe they should be barred from the locker room until they have unseen it? What if a female reporter happens to be at the same beach as a male athlete she has interviewed? Should she not wear a bathing suit to the beach just in case?
In any case, this is all basically heteronormative bullshit and body policing. Mark Madden thinks that there is some great divide separating us all into binary straight men and binary straight women, and that the binary woman’s body is something to be ashamed of, something that she should cover up (or possibly not even have at all) if she hopes to be respected as a journalist. Because it’s an awful lot to ask for people to be respectful, aware adults who understand both the human body and sexual boundaries, apparently. The world can be incredibly ugly, but it would also be really damn easy to go into an interview and just LISTEN and BE PROFESSIONAL, regardless of the interviewer’s (or interviewee’s) appearance or body.
This is the same logic by which Catholic schoolgirls are reminded once they reach a certain age that boys are looking up their skirts on the stairs. The boys are not told that they shouldn’t be peeping up skirts, or told that they should think of a female body as a normal part of life that should be respected and honored. The girls are told to wear bike shorts under their skirts. The girls are told that the boys can’t control their behavior, and that no one is looking out for them except themselves.
In this world, your body is the thing that destroys your credibility. Not even that you show it, but the fact that it even exists and could be shown. Slip up and you’re fucked. It is of course not a man’s responsibility to respect a woman’s body and status as a human being on principle. That would be absurd.
Right, because then the leap to respecting her as a professional would be all too easy. Logical, even.
Bottom line: you can’t have one without the other. Until we manage to unpack and successfully confront as a society the fact that women are treated, all at the same time, like second-class citizens, children, objects, and unknowable “others” full of the deep sexual secrets of the entire human race, none of this will get better. Because we’ve gotta confront this attitude about being a non-white-man. There’s a lot of work to do here. Until you respect a woman as a person, you can’t even begin to speak about her journalism career. Your bias is evident before you’ve even thought of the genesis of a criticism.
Because Britt McHenry tried to do a pretty straightforward hockey assignment for ESPN, and a bunch of WHITE MALE SPORTS JOURNALISTS decided to have a meltdown about it. Britt McHenry tried to do her job. So, arguably, did Kovacevic and Madden, except they have such free reign over their job descriptions that vile sniping and troll-baiting towards a female reporter can be considered just another day at the office.
Britt McHenry recommended that they educate themselves:
@MarkMaddenX@Dejan_Kovacevic look into grad programs like Northwestern & Columbia. Could really help you both. Best wishes!
— Britt McHenry (@BrittMcHenry) December 16, 2014
Honestly? Sick burn.
Continuing my theme of recommending literary criticism/theory to White Male Sports Journalists (Rob Rossi still hasn’t responded to my call to action to read Derrida): I’d like to challenge Dejan and Mark to learn a bit about viewership and perception and gender/feminist theory, maybe easing in with Laura Mulvey and then getting into the FUN STUFF with some Judith Butler.
God, what would happen if Mark Madden and Judith Butler ended up in a room together? Could we televise that conversation? Please?
It is no longer acceptable to not be educated and thoughtful about the opinion that you want to present. That doesn’t mean that you need to necessarily read a shitton of philosophy and theory. But it does mean that your evidence for your argument and reception to criticism should be more than anecdotal. Develop a holistic understanding of that which challenges you. Think about the ways in which you might be wrong in addition to the ways in which you might be right. And try to do some research.
Most importantly, listen, and be prepared to defend what you say back–not in a reactionary way, but in a thoughtful and well-considered way.
Believe in your own damn self and the value of your words–and not just because you think you can cite a series of trademarks owned by the Lemieux Group as proof of your credibility.
VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN!
Anyway, I’m planning on coming up with a podcast series in 2015 that addresses issues of feminism/representation/intersectionality/misogyny in hockey media and hockey fan culture. I’ll have a bigger post about that soon.<3 <3 <3
ETA: Took a listen to Madden’s podcast from yesterday. The stuff he says about McHenry is actually somewhat predatory. Link here: http://www.donotlink.com/cxsy
By the way, if you think you can block me, and put me out of your life forever on Twitter, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. I have a second twitter account, with a name you’d never figure out, that I just use to observe.
(the “I am watching” tactic that a lot of these guys are pulling these days. “Don’t talk about me, I will find you”–as if it isn’t something that would be said to his face anyway.)
Hey, she’s just trying to do her job, but she’s terrible at it. And–good-looking women just think they’re not to be criticized for anything. If you’ve ever known a good-looking woman, you know it’s true. They think their looks are just their ticket to everywhere, and how dare you question anything they do? Now, way down inside, to quote Robert Plant, they may be a burning urn of churning insecurity, and often are.
(see: everything I said above about disrespect of female bodies. Madden has discredited McHenry not by discussing her reporting, but by targeting her body.)
Don’t be sexist don’t be mean don’t be obscene. Just ridicule her for her incompetence.
(but you haven’t mentioned anything that she has done that was incompetent on your show, therefore you have made the focus of your discussion the fact that she is a female person. what else do you think people are going to say, when you have guys calling in every day who say you are the “king”)
Oh here’s the story on Britt McHenry with Jay Gruden. Earlier this season, she reported on ESPN that Griffin had alienated himself from the locker room (Robert Griffin III). . .and described an incident where Griffin was trying to do media, and his teammates made so much noise to make the tape unusable that he had to leave the room to do the interviews, and then his teammates cheered louder. That was McHenry’s report. And Jay Gruden said that it was an amateurish report, that it was totally not true, and for anybody who reads that to believe that, they’re an amateur, anyone who reports that is an amateur.
(Jay Gruden is the head coach of the Washington Redskins apparently, which makes him a very unbiased source regarding potentially controversial happenings in the Washington Redskins locker room, amirite? Not like an old white dude would lie, after all. Pretty sure that’s never happened.)
I will say this about Britt McHenry. I can’t find any record of her having dated athletes. But it’s very very early in her career.
(Implies that Britt McHenry is only in her line of work to date athletes, implies that Britt McHenry’s credibility and her love life are inextricably linked, because it all comes back to sex if you’re Mark Madden. I understand it can be hard to think of other things in life.)
